Radek Szlaga / Post-Peace / NEST, Den Haag, 20.05-26.07.2017

Post-Peace brings together artists from a variety of origins to question how war and peace appear today. Many works in the exhibition are united by common expressions of danger, fear, and the feeling of disorientation created by mass media’s multiple versions of reality.

The First World War used to be described as “the War to End All Wars” at the time, but the First World War paved the war for the Second, whose conclusion gave us the Postwar Era, defined by the central antagonism of the USA and the USSR, the “Cold War,” with its myriad proxy conflicts and regional wars. The defeat of the Soviet Union and the triumph of capitalist democracy was meant to usher in a new non-conflictual age, but this period in which the “peace” of global capitalism can only be bought at the price of continuous violence and warfare, is probably best described as Post-Peace.

The exhibition Post-Peace is not directly about war, but rather about peace. Gathered together the selected artists will expose, through a visual conversation, the screen of peace as it functions today. How much war is present in our contemporary peace? That is the question.